Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s
largest bookseller, announced it has signed a lease agreement to open a
new Barnes & Noble bookstore in Overland Park, Kansas, which is in the
Kansas City area. The bookstore, expected to open in April 2009, will be
part of the Corbin Park shopping center, which is surrounded by 135th
Street, Lamar Avenue, 138th Street and Metcalf
Avenue. The store will stock close to 200,000 book, music, DVD and
magazine titles and include a café serving
Starbucks coffee.

Barnes & Noble’s bookselling innovations
have established it as America’s top
bookseller brand. For the fourth year in a row, the EquiTrend®
Brand Study by Harris Interactive® named
Barnes & Noble bookstores number one in overall brand equity, which is
based on a brand’s strength in familiarity,
quality and purchase intent. The new store will feature:

The Barnes & Noble Membership Program. Designed for Barnes
& Noble’s best customers, this program
gives Members 40% off hardcover fiction and nonfiction bestsellers,
20% off all other adult hardcover books, and 10% off virtually
everything else in Barnes & Noble stores and online at Barnes &
Noble.com. The annual fee is $25.

Rapid special-order service. Can’t
find it on the shelf? Barnes & Noble’s
massive warehouse inventory is available in real-time, enabling its
booksellers to order and confirm the availability of over one million
titles at the click of a button.

Large-scale children’s departments. Bigger
than most typical bookstores and stocking over 15,000 titles in an
easy-to-browse environment, “Barnes & Noble
Jr.” departments are designed to appeal to
children, parents, teachers and librarians. Children’s
story hours will be held three times a week.

Advanced technology music-listening and movie-previewing system.
The store’s music department will feature
RedDotNet, the most advanced listening and previewing technology.
RedDotNet enables customers to listen to any CD in the store, sampling
up to 270,000 music titles by simply passing it under a scanner.
Connected to the company’s online
electronic music catalog, the store’s
listening stations make “browsing with your
ears” a reality. Thanks to the latest
technology, RedDotNet stations also allow customers to view a
three-minute clip of up to 60,000 DVDs.

Giant Newsstand. The store’s
newsstand stocks over 2,000 titles, including hundreds of hard-to-find
specialty magazines, out-of-town and even foreign newspapers.

Wi-Fi Service. AT&T Wi-FiSM
service allows customers to use their laptop computers and personal
digital assistants anywhere in the store or café
to communicate online, surf the Internet and connect to corporate
networks at speeds 50 to 100 times as fast as a dial-up connection. A
single two-hour session costs $3.95, and an annual membership with
unlimited access to Barnes & Noble and more than 10,700 AT&T Wi-Fi hot
spots is available for $19.95 per month (with a one-year commitment).

Community Center. The Barnes & Noble store will serve as a
local community center, hosting a number of community events
throughout the year. They will include author readings and
discussions, book clubs, and programs with local literary and cultural
organizations. The store will also hold bookfairs, partnering with
local schools and other community institutions.

About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s
largest bookseller and a Fortune 500 company, operates 801 bookstores in
50 states. For the fourth year in a row, the company is the nation’s
top bookseller brand, as determined by a brand’s
overall strength based on its combination of familiarity, quality and
purchase intent, according to the EquiTrend®
Brand Study by Harris Interactive®. Barnes &
Noble conducts its online business through Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com),
one of the Web’s largest e-commerce sites.